Category Archives: American Studies

‘All Manner of Fluxes:’ Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America

Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By Fiona O’Brien

The flows and fluxes of bodily fluids that determined an early modern woman’s embodied existence would need to be, if not controlled, understood by her. If we focus on the fluidity of the early modern reproductive body, we can begin to better understand the materia medica used to treat it; once we do so, we can begin to compare worldviews more aptly, and examine, for example, the continuities and breaks between the reproductive pharmacopeias used by Indigenous Americans and English colonists. If we accept population expansion and settlement to be a key aspect of the building of the early paternalistic American state, these materia medica used for regulating the female body become pertinent to histories of colonization, law, and politics. How was the natalist conquest of early Northeast America fueled by this piecemeal process of filling a pharmacopeia full of the familiar, and stuffing the unfamiliar into known molds? How do we investigate this process as historians, when both parties of women concerned, Indigenous and English, left few records behind?

European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.


English colonists uniformly observed that Indigenous women gave birth in total isolation, did not feel pain while doing so, and recovered almost immediately: in 1634, William Wood tells English readers that for Indigenous women in New England, “a bigge bellie hinders no business, nor a childebirthe takes much time.” [1] Clearly, there was a lack of interest in recording the birthing practices of Indigenous women. But maybe we begin to get answers if we flow between sources, thus crafting an amorphous middle-ground. Early modern recipes encourage us to engage with sources collectively; those sources themselves cannot be understood in isolation, but require that the historian temporarily inhabit the phenomenal, the experiential, the habitual body.

According to Western medicine, peak health was believed to be reached when humoral balance was suited to the condition, climate, and individual. It was therefore believed that when early modern Europeans left their homelands, they risked moral, customary, and physiological degeneration; a hot climatic change would cool the man’s body and heat the woman’s.[2] The overheated female body could overmenstruate, expel fetuses, and fail to purify blood into seed or breastmilk.[3] This risked the colonial project: women were required to establish a successful colony, but their reproductivity was in danger within this humoral cosmology.

In order for a medication to be successful, it must purge: the healing patient should be vomiting, bleeding, urinating, sweating, or crying. This meant the body’s proper flow was restored, needless stoppages and loose fluids ushered back into their rightful places.[4] The humoral chilly moistness of the female body rendered the woman passive and kind, but also meant that her body was dangerously subject to disease due to its porosity and permeability.[5] Much of the female body’s organization and survival was linked to her heat, blood flow, womb, and seed, and thus to her menstrual capabilities.

But how did the English understand new ingredients that may have been visually identical to their own cures contained within their recipe books back in the metropole? ‘Flow’ provides a useful starting point. As Laurence Totelin puts it, “a woman’s life is marked by fluxes, healthy or otherwise,”[6] so historians must broadly consider the use of abortifacients or emmenagogues– agents which increase blood circulation to the pelvic area and stimulate menstruation[7]–without being clouded by our modern understanding of abortion.

Perhaps ‘flow’ was on the minds of colonists when they spotted the ubiquitous and familiar fern crawling up New England stumps and rocks. Maidenhair and polypody ferns were repeated throughout their recipe books’ entries, specifically when related to flow and heat: in 1719, Mary Kettilby recommended a mixture of herbs sweetened with “Syrup of Maiden-hair” as “a cooling drink in a Fever or Pleurisie.” Midwife Jane Sharp recommended that the polypody ferns be “bruised and boyl[ed]” then drunk, as a remedy “Against the Piles or Hemorrhoids” in postpartum women, and in 1674, Susanna Packe recommended “six ounces Polipedy” to “cleans the body of sharp humor or Mullinchollly.”

The Haudenosaunee use(d) lamb’s quarters to prevent milk flow when the child is stillborn,[8] and black snakeroot to promote it when the child is healthy.[9] Kettilby recommended “Virginia snake-weed” for use “in any malignant distemper,”[10] and in 1798 Benjamin Barton called it “a valuable medicine…sometimes called Squaw-root…from its having been used as a medicine by our Indians.”[11] “Squaw-root” points to its omnipresence in Indigenous midwifery pharmacopeia for its promotion of slow labor.[12]  Jane Staveley’s 1693 recipe book recommended “A very strengthening Medicine,” including “1 Oz. of Snake root put into a Bottle of Port Wine,” while a century later and an ocean apart, Martha Ballard recalled the inclusion of Virginia snakeroot in a water used to deliver a woman of a dead child.[13]

We can turn back to the fern here, too: maidenhair is recommended by the Haudenosaunee for excessive menstruation and abortal pains. Biologist Lenore May notes that maidenhair fronds were distilled into syrups to mitigate “female disorders” by Indigenous Americans.[14] The American Adiantum pedatum variety of maidenhair was interpreted by colonists as interchangeable with the English variety, Adiantum capillus-veneris. “Maiden Hair, or Cappellus veneris verus” was recommended by John Josselyn in 1672  “For all manner of Fluxes.” In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper remarked that fern can “purge the belly” and “cause abortion.”[15] Sharp, on cures for womb ulcers that have degenerated into fistulas, recommended a “vulnerary decoction”–used to aid in the healing of wounds– of, among other ingredients, the “roots of male fern.”

Purgation and reinstatement of proper flow are central, so the removal of a deceased fetus was also relevant. Postpartum hemorrhage, or “bloody flux” after delivery, was certainly a death sentence, to say nothing of resulting childbed fevers and infections. The Seneca practiced some form of herbal family limitation for centuries preconquest,[16] but the conflation of abortifacients used for non-abortive reproductive health purposes has led to confusion: overall, both Indigenous and English women placed emphasis on bodily flow. This emphasis in Indigenous communities is compounded by their use of sweat lodges and herb-smoking,[17] mirrored in European reproductive healthcare back to the medieval period.[18]

When we privilege “flow” as a search term, we begin to understand more about the history of colonization, and health writ large. Flow is inherent in the medium of the recipe book, too: as Wendy Wall argues, recipes represent a transitional space, the movement from “raw to cooked…nature to art, from shapeless materia to cultural product.”[19] The epistemology of the recipe book is then one predicated on flow, just as was the success of an early modern reproductive remedy.
*****
Fiona O’Brien is a second year PhD student in history at Fordham University, where she is a Loyola Distinguished Fellow and works as a writing tutor to undergraduate students. She recently completed a funded Scholarly Programs Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, during which she presented work on early modern abortion. She presented papers focused on early modern reproductive history at several conferences over the course of her first year of the PhD, including one which analyzed the medical character of late medieval fertility and birth rituals and compared them to early modern remedy. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. During this latter degree, she was supervised by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra in the completion of her thesis, entitled “Our Groans to God: The Synching of Sensory and Emotional Experience During the Early Modern Birth Process,” and worked as a graduate promotions fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies.

Works Cited
Primary Sources

Barton, Benjamin Smith. Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States. Philadelphia, 1798. The National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2542050R

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses. Edited by Diana Vowles. Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009.

Herrick, James W., and Dean R. Snow. Iroquois Medical Botany. 1st ed. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors. Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Kettilby, Mary. A collection of above three hundred recipes in cookery, physick and surgery: for the use of all good wives, tender mothers, and careful nurses. The second edition. London: Printed for Mary Kettilby, 1719. National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov

Packe, Susanna. Cookbook of Susanna Packe [manuscript].1 674. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.215. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library

Plant Atlas 2020. Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland and UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Biological Records Center, UK. https://plantatlas2020.org/atlas/.

PLANTS Database. Natural Resources Conservation Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture, https://plants.usda.gov/

Sharp, Jane. The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifry discovered.: Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves in their conception, breeding, bearing, and nursing of children in six books. London: Printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the West End of St. Pauls, 1671. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership and digital collection Early English Books Online 2. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A93039.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

Wood, William. New England’s Prospect. London, 1634. In O’Brien, Jean M. “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Secondary Sources

Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds. Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Kumar, Dinesh, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash. “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2011.12.039.

May, Lenore Wile. “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies.” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), pp. 491-528. Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press.

Mendelson, Sara Heller, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. Clarendon Press, 1998.

Rublack, Ulinka, and Pamela Selwyn. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002): 1–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289771.

Shoemaker, Nancy.  “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women.”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. Health and Wellness in Colonial America. Health and Wellness in Daily Life. Greenwood, 2012.

Totelin, Laurence M.V. “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology.”  Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Thumiger, Chiara. Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill, 2021.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, and Martha Ballard. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991.

Volo, James and Dorothy. Family Life in Native America. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Weisser, Olivia. Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Yale University Press, 2015.

[1] William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634), in Jean M. O’Brien, “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007): 353. Colonizing men made similar observations toward Black women in the Caribbean; for more information, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some could suckle over their shoulder’: male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167-192.

[2] Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),  44.

[3] Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 133-134.

[4] Ulinka Rublack and Pamela Selwyn, “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002), 1-2.

[5] Sara Heller Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20.

[6] Laurence M.V. Totelin, “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology,” Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Chiara Thumiger, Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill (2021) 220.

[7] Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash, “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32.

[8]James W. Herrick and Dean R. Snow, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, The Iroquois and Their Neighbors, Syracuse University Press, 1995, 142

[9]  James W. Herric, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, (Syracuse University Press, 1995), 119.

[10] Kettilby. A collection, 133-134

[11] Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States, (Philadelphia, 1798, The National Library of Medicine), 9.

[12] Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, Health and Wellness in Colonial America, Health and Wellness in Daily Life, (Greenwood, 2012),  60-61.

[13] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Martha Ballard, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991, 407.

[14] Lenore Wile May, “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies,” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press, 508.

[15]  Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses, edited by Diana Vowles, (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009), 158.

[16] Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900, eds. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 318.

[17] James and Dorothy Volo, Family Life in Native America, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), 95.

[18] Monica Helen Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine.

[19] Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),  5.

Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Stew of Global Threads

For my brother, Manuel Pino, who keeps our family’s best memories alive through his cooking.

Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
By Alessandra Pino

Recipe: Ropa Vieja (Serves 6)

Legend has it that a poor man once cooked his old clothes because he had nothing else to feed his family. His love and care transformed the rags into a rich and comforting stew known as Ropa Vieja.

Although today it is considered a symbol of Cuban cuisine, both the story and the dish originated in the Canary Islands. The first known mention of the recipe appears in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857).[1]

First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111
First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111


In my Venezuelan family, this recipe has been passed down through generations. We call it
carne mechada and serve it inside arepas, a corn-based flatbread. I am recording it for the first time as I cook it for this piece.

Ingredients:

  • 900g flank steak, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • 1 onion, peeled and quartered
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, sliced lengthwise into strips
  • 1 small red bell pepper, deseeded and sliced
  • 120g tinned chopped tomatoes
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Method:

  1. Place the beef, quartered onion, garlic, and bay leaf in a pot and add enough water to cover. Bring to a slow boil over medium heat, then reduce to low and simmer for 2–3 hours.
  2. Strain the beef and broth through a fine-mesh strainer, reserving the liquid. When the beef is cool enough to handle, shred it with your fingers or two forks.
  3. In a skillet, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the sliced onion and green pepper and cook for 3–4 minutes, until softened. Stir in 360 ml of the remaining broth, tomatoes, shredded beef, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes to combine the flavours.

A Stew of Empire and displacement

Few dishes embody the entangled histories of empire, trade, and transcultural adaptation as vividly as ropa vieja, the “old clothes” stew that today stands as a culinary emblem of Cuba and the Canary Islands. Its name conjures up rags and scraps, yet its history is anything but threadbare: Jewish Sabbath traditions, Iberian colonial expansion, African slavery, and Indigenous ingredients of the Americas are stitched together in this deeply resilient dish.

Because cooking was prohibited on the Sabbath, Sephardi Jews often prepared a hearty stew the night before, allowing it to cook slowly until the following day. Ropa vieja is often understood as echoing these Iberian Jewish culinary traditions of the late medieval and early modern period. Sabbath dishes such as adafina or cholent — slow-cooked blends of legumes, vegetables, and meat — sometimes left behind strands of beef once the broth was consumed. These remnants could be reheated with onions, garlic, and chickpeas, producing a dish that resembled tattered rags, perhaps inspiring the evocative name ropa vieja. Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversions that followed, such recipes circulated into new cultural contexts. Adapted and reinterpreted over generations, they persisted within Iberian domestic cooking, carrying traces of memory and identity even as Jewish ritual and language were suppressed. As Gitlitz and Davidson explain, Spanish and Portuguese mariners began exploring the off-shore African islands — the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira — in the early fifteenth century. By its end, farming colonies and trading posts had been established, turning the islands into key “stopover points” for Atlantic galleons engaged in the South Atlantic and American trade.[2]

Crossing Oceans: From Canary Islands to the Caribbean

The dish entered global circulation with Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands and subsequently the Caribbean. In Cuba, ropa vieja adapted to locally available ingredients. Cattle introduced by Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 thrived on the island, becoming central to ranching economies and local diets. African enslaved cooks contributed slow-braising techniques and sofrito — a base of onions, garlic, and other vegetables gently cooked in olive oil —  while Indigenous crops such as tomatoes and peppers transformed the dish’s flavour. Ropa vieja thus became a product of empire, blending Iberian culinary traditions with African labour and American ingredients in colonial households. Each component reflects a history of circulation and encounter: beef reshaped Caribbean landscapes, supplying hides for European markets and meat for colonial stews; chickpeas, central in Iberian and Canarian versions, sustained sailors and settlers but were less prominent in Cuban adaptations; and tomatoes and peppers, native to the Americas, were cultivated in the Caribbean alongside Iberian staples like onions and garlic, exemplifying the transatlantic movement and exchange of crops.

As Fernando Ortiz observes in his discussion of plantation life in Cuba in his essay Los factores humanos de la cubanided (1939), “In Cuba’s pot there is always a constant renewal of roots, fruits, and exotic meats, an unceasing bubbling of heterogeneous substances.”[3] The plantation system that shaped the Caribbean landscape violently brought together people from diverse origins who, despite profound inequalities, interacted socially and culturally. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s perspective was that the Caribbean could not be considered a single cultural area, since the mix of different colonial powers made it too heterogeneous to fit that definition. Instead, he proposed the term “societal area,” describing the region as a socio-cultural space structured by the plantation system. (Mintz, 1966).[4] Mintz’s concept captures the fragmentary nature of Caribbean cultures, stitched together by a language of colonial dominance until they fused into something new. I argue that this dynamic extends to food itself: the region’s culinary cultures reflect a constant process of interaction and adaptation, where ingredients and techniques from Africa, Europe, and the Americas combined to create shared expressions. In this way, a common language of flavour emerged from displacement, survival, and creativity. The dish becomes, in effect, a ragged form of globalization, stitched together from uneven power, movement, and culinary ingenuity. In my chapter on “Dark Food” (Palgrave, 2025), I explore how violence is integral to this process, showing how food can carry and transmit memories that continually reconstruct narratives of oppression and suffering.

Invisible Hands: Women and Enslaved Cooks

Although colonial records often privilege governors, merchants, and planters, the making of ropa vieja depended on domestic cooks — many women, many enslaved or otherwise marginalized. African-descended cooks in Cuban households brought Indigenous crops and African cooking techniques into Iberian stews, layering them with flavour and complexity. Women have long been central to the transmission and transformation of Caribbean traditions, even if historical documentation has largely obscured their contributions. As Keja L. Valens observes,

“Ropa vieja” inscribes a mixing of ­ European (flour, beef, wine), Indigenous (tomatoes and peppers), and African (plantains) ingredients, doing so ­ under a recognizably Spanish-­ language title. As much as they declare its ­ independence from Spain, ­ these White Criollo authors claim the dish. “Ropa vieja” serves settlers who occupy, incorporate, and claim as their own the ­ tables and kitchens of Cuba. As they break from the colonial center, the settlement remains. (Valens 2024, p.62)

Valens further notes that cookbooks rarely include detailed biographical information, meaning that the labour and expertise of women — often exercised in domestic or informal spaces — is transmitted primarily through recipes rather than through explicit authorial self-representation.

Recipes as Memory and Metaphor

The name “old clothes” resonates powerfully in this colonial context. Just as the dish turned scraps into nourishment, displaced peoples — Sephardic Jews, conversos (converted Iberian Jews), enslaved Africans, and Canarians — wove fragments of memory, ritual, and foodways into continuity. The preparation of traditional dishes like ropa vieja involves more than following a recipe; it encompasses embodied knowledge passed down through generations. This tacit knowledge includes techniques, timing, and sensory cues that are often not documented but are crucial for authentic preparation. The act of cooking such dishes serves as a living archive, preserving cultural practices and memories; as Francisca Sinjae has argued, “across the world, food is not just sustenance; it is a living archive, a record of migration, survival, identity, and belonging.”[5] Food preparation is a form of cultural expression and memory, where each dish tells a story of migration, adaptation, and survival. The recipe’s adaptability made it a form of culinary survival: to simmer shredded beef with onions and tomatoes was to claim a taste of familiarity while fashioning something distinctly of the Americas. In this sense, ropa vieja embodied the patchwork realities of colonial life.[6]

From Stew to Symbol

By the eighteenth century, ropa vieja was firmly recognised as part of Cuban cuisine.[7] Today, it is celebrated both as Cuba’s national dish and as a heritage food of the Canary Islands. Its survival illustrates how recipes forged in colonial entanglements persist as markers of identity, memory, and resilience.

Centuries later, in Miami, Cuban exiles revived and popularised the dish, transforming it into a symbol of home and memory within the American landscape. In Cuba itself, it acquired poignant resonance during the 1990s Período Especial, when meat shortages forced cooks to adapt. On television, culinary icon Nitza Villapol famously demonstrated a version suggesting the use of plantain skins in place of beef, a modern echo of the “old rags” metaphor and a reminder of the creativity born from scarcity.[8]

A Global Ragout

Ropa vieja is a culinary palimpsest, its flavours carrying the traces of Jewish exile, Iberian colonisation, African labour, and Indigenous ingredients. To taste it is to encounter the fragments of empire itself, scraps reassembled into sustenance like old clothes patched into new garments, carrying traces of resilience and creative adaptation that give the dish new life with each preparation. In her review of Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast for The Recipes Project, Peggy Brunache emphasizes how Indigenous communities have long used food as a form of resistance and cultural assertion, noting that “Indigenous communities performed culinary resistance through a politics of food and stood culturally resilient against colonial manipulation and assimilation.”  As a platform, The Recipes Project itself sustains this ongoing conversation between food, history, and identity, revealing how culinary practices can serve as both archives and acts of meaning-making. This perspective illuminates how cooking, including the preparation of ropa vieja, transcends mere sustenance. It becomes a deliberate act of cultural preservation and identity maintenance, an embodied form of resistance through which displaced or marginalized communities uphold heritage, reinforce communal bonds, and assert belonging in the face of colonial and postcolonial pressures. In this sense, ropa vieja not only preserves the past but also speaks to the present: a dish refashioned across generations, carrying in each bite the intertwined histories of memory, survival, and identity.

*****
Alessandra Pino is an expert on the intersections of the Gothic, food, and cultural memory. Born in Hampstead, London, to an Italian mother and Venezuelan diplomat father, Alessandra grew up in different countries and across cultures and languages. She holds degrees from ‘L’Orientale’ University, Naples (Italy), and from the University of Westminster (UK, MA in Translation Studies); she was awarded a PhD in Food, Cultural Memory, and the Gothic in 2022. Alessandra worked with a Michelin-starred chef for nearly ten years before moving to academia, researching and publishing on food, cultural memory, the supernatural and the Gothic.

Alessandra is the co-author of A Gothic Cookbook, which digs into food themes and motifs in a series of classic and contemporary novels from the 19th century to the present day and the co-host of “Fear Feasts,” a podcast which analyses the horror genre- films and books- through the lens of food. She publishes and speaks/lectures on the history of food, cultural memory, the supernatural, horror and the Gothic in journals, anthologies, TV and podcasts.

FURTHER READING

Barthes, Roland. 1975. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster, 47–59. New York: Harper and Row.

Brunache, Peggy. “New Work Forum: On Food and Identity in Cevasco’s Violent Appetites.” The Recipes Project, July 7. Accessed October 24, 2024.

Cabrisas, Juan. 1858. Nuevo manual de la cocinera catalana y cubana.

Douglas, Mary. 1972. “Deciphering a Meal.” 

Gitlitz, David M., and Linda Kay Davidson. 1999. A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jawhara Piñer, Hélène. 2021. Sephardi: Cooking the History. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Langarika, Enrique. 1862. El cocinero de los enfermos, convalecientes. Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana. Biblioteca Nacional de España; UTSA Digital Collections, Texas.

Legran, J. P. 1857. Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español: con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas. Havana: [s.n.]. 

Mintz, S.W. 1966. “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4), 912-937.

Noviatur, J. F. 1891. Novísimo manual del cocinero pastelero dulcero y licorista cubano. Havana: Imprenta La Idea.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1939. “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” In Ensayos etnosociológicos, 10–31. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Pelaéz, Ana Sofía, and Ellen Silverman. 2014. The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Pino, Alessandra. 2025. “Dark Food.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies, edited by Lucy Bond, Susannah Radstone, and Jessica Rapson, 263–283. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pino, Alessandra. 2020. Hunger and Meaning in the Novels of Cristina García. 

RWI Magazine. The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive.

The Atlantic. 2016. “Cuba’s Julia Child.” The Atlantic, August 2016. 

Valens, Keja L. 2024. Culinary Colonialism. Rutgers University Press.

Villapol, Nitza. 2022. Cocina al Minuto YouTube video. Posted 7 July 2022.

NOTES

[1] There is a reference to this being the first known mention in Pelaéz and Silverman, The Cuban Table (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014) p.162. See also the ‘ropa vieja’ recipe in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857) by J.P. Legran. The complete title is: Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español : con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas.

[2] For the link between Sephardic Sabbath stews and later Iberian/Atlantic shredded-meat dishes, see David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 207; and Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Sephardi: Cooking the History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021). Both discuss adafina/dafina/hamín as a slow-cooked Jewish stew in medieval and early modern Iberia.

[3] F. Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” in Ensayos etnosociologicos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1939), 10-31. “Siempre en la olla de Cuba es un renovado entrar de raíces, frutos y carnes exógenas, un incesante borbotar de heterogéneas sustancias.” Quote is on p. 6. My translation.

[4] “It would probably be more accurate to refer to the Caribbean as a ‘societal area’ based on the plantation system.” Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4) (1966), pp. 912–937.

[5] Francisca Sinjae, “The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive,” Raising Women Magazine, September 15, 2025

[6] My work on comparison between the culinary process and the process of memory formation in relation to constructions of identity and nation is available here. Going beyond the idea of food as being purely nutritional, Barthes’ use of semiotics allows for a contextualisation of food in its role as a signifier. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 47–59. Mary Douglas’ work in “Deciphering a Meal” establishes the importance of memory in creating food patterns. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus Vol. 101, No. 1, Myth, Symbol, and Culture (Winter, 1972), pp. 61-81. Douglas’ work is available here.  

[7] Valens points out that this is evident in the cookbooks of the time: the Manual del cocinero cubano includes just one recipe for “Ropa vieja andaluza,” alongside recipes for both “Ropa vieja cubana” and “Ropa vieja habanera.” In contrast, Legran’s cookbook presents only “Ropa vieja á la Americana,” Cabrisas includes only “Ropa vieja cubana,” El cocinero de los enfermos contains only “Ropa vieja cubana,” and the Novísimo edition of Noviatur features only “Ropa vieja habanera.”

[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/cuba-castro-villapol-julia-child/494342/

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 

The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method

By Serin Quinn

The earliest known recipe referencing tomatoes was published in Naples in 1692. This is not simply the earliest European recipe to include the ingredient, but the first written tomato recipe world-wide. The history of the tomato – a foodstuff indigenous to the Americas – is dominated by European sources: our recipes, botanical descriptions and illustrations all stem from either European or post-conquest authors.

How, then, can we use such European recipes to understand the cultural influence of Indigenous American cultures? This blog explores how following taste offers us a means to recreate the unrecorded past and to bring to the fore hidden histories.

I am not the first to note this issue: following Marcy Norton’s 2008 work Sacred Gifts, scholars have begun to reconsider the role of American foods in European cuisines. Nonetheless, studies to date have focused on foods that have distinct paraphernalia (chocolate cups or tobacco pipes) or that have necessary treatments, such as the nixtamalization of maize or de-toxification of cassava. The pre-Columbian history of the tomato is harder to grasp, but its study shows us that even the most ordinary of American foods had a fundamental influence on the food cultures of Europe.

[Xi]tomamolli: Mesoamerican tomato sauces

To reconstruct pre-Columbian tomato-usage (in Nahuatl xitomatl), we must consider the form and taste of food and relationship between ingredients.

The post-conquest primary sources we do have – ethnographies such as the so-called Florentine Codex and government reports such as the Relaciones Geográficas – provide us with two key pieces of information. These sources do not give us a fixed recipe of the type we would find in contemporaneous recipe European books, but there are notable consistencies in their reports that speak to common, repeated practice. Critically, these sources repeatedly tell us that tomatoes were consumed as a sauce or stew and that they were consistently paired with chili peppers: as the Relaciones report from Texcoco (1582) stated, ‘They have tomatoes and tomatillos, which serve as a spice with chilli, from which they make sauces and appetizers to eat’.

Ethnographic work suggests tomatoes and chilis were first charred to remove the skin and then pounded together using a stone molcaxitl (‘sauce bowl’) and a texolotl grinding stone. This sauce-paste was then used to flavour dishes such as tamales and stews of beans, turkey eggs or meat (deer/dog/turkey/fish/newt). As the authors of the Florentine Codex observed: ‘Where [it is] tasty, [it has] chili, salt, tomatoes, gourd seeds: shredded, crumbled, juiced’. This is the quintessential Mesoamerican tomato recipe, as recreated from common practice.

In the centuries following the conquest, tomatoes continued to be eaten in this way by the populations of New Spain. As one chronicler wrote in 1698, tomato-dishes were the ‘be-all, end-all of the stews of the Indies’.

Salsa de tomates: tomatoes in Iberia

Across the Atlantic, in the Spanish-controlled Mediterranean, we see a clear continuation of both these forms of cooking and of the tomato-chili nexus.

The earliest recipe, from Spanish Naples, is for a tomato sauce ‘in the Spanish style’, and sauces and stews/soups also form the bulk of recipes in Spanish and Portuguese. The author of a manuscript Portuguese cookbook (c. 1715) wrote: ‘Tomatoes in all foods, that is, in meat, in stews, or in roast sauces, add a particular flavor to everything’.

Almost all recipes from this period are directions to use tomatoes as a sauce or as the base for stews/casseroles (with one or two recipes directing tomatoes to be pickled or used in salads). If we deconstruct these recipes to their base elements, a consistent method appears that can be expressed as follows:

Take ripe tomatoes; roast them; remove their skins; mince or crush them until fine; mix with chili, oil and vinegar and [onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, oregano, or thyme], serve with [fish, chicken, eggs, beans, or rice].

Some aspects of the flavour profile varied between recipe in the choice of herbs, spices and alliums, but the addition of chili, as well as oil and vinegar, was almost always to be found. The association between the two foods was so strong that they were customarily depicted together in paintings.

Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.
Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.

 

Love apple sauce: tomatoes in Britain

The transfer of tomato-tastes to Spanish colonisers and subsequently to their homeland in Iberia is perhaps not surprising. Yet through tomato recipes we can see that the spread of Mesoamerican tomato-chili sauces travelled further, into the early modern British diet.

English recipes for tomatoes – then called love-apples – fall into two categories: pickles and sauces/soups. Recipes for these sauces use the methods seen above: rather than ‘roasted’ they are ‘baked’ and their skins removed by pulping through a sieve rather than peeling, but the result is the same. Importantly, alongside ‘Old World’ ingredients such as onion and ginger, almost all these recipes contained chilis. We see this across both print and manuscript recipes, and usually in the form of ‘capsicum’ or chili vinegar, as in the recipe below.

These sauces came to Britain not through direct colonial contact with Mesoamerica, as in Iberia. Rather, the authors of eighteenth-century encyclopaedias and gardening manuals attested to a different origin of influence: Jewish refugees, specifically Sephardi Jews fleeing the Spanish/Portuguese inquisitions of the 1720s. As one horticulturalist noted, ‘it is agreeable in Soups. Those who are us’d to eat with the Portuguese Jews know the Value of it’. As Iberian consumers once adopted a taste for the tomato from Mesoamericans, so they later brought it with them to their new home.

In both Iberia and Britain, therefore, we see how the tastes of a minority group can have a powerful and lasting impact on the diets and desires of the majority, and how knowledge is spread through a series of incorporations and re-introductions.  

‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.
‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.

The enduring relationship between tomatoes and the chilis illuminates a path of cultural influence from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to eighteenth-century Britain. While we lack detailed guides on how tomatoes were prepared prior to the conquest, understanding preparation methods and flavours profiles allows us to trace the movement of culinary knowledge over time and space and to reestablish the role of Indigenous American tastes in shaping European cuisine.
*****
Serin Quinn is an early modern historian, specialising in food, horticulture and global connectivity. Her PhD at the University of Warwick was on the introduction of the tomato to early modern England and was funded by Midlands4Cities. Her article on the early English reception of sweet potatoes recently won the Food & History Best Article Award 2025. As of October 2026, she has a research fellowship with the Society for Renaissance Studies, working on a new project on aphrodisiac-foods in pre-modern Europe.

 

Stovetop Solidarity: “Recipes for Semi-Starvation” and Antipoverty Organizing in American Cities

By Kimba Stahler

Flipping through recipe cards or a cookbook is not the apolitical exercise some might think. Whether picked by workers earning a fair wage in a safe environment or transported by truck drivers fighting for a better union contract, ingredients politicize meals.

Historically and recently, American consumer boycotts have moved the picket line to the checkout counter. Refusing to buy meat in 1935, Delano grapes in 1969, or Starbucks coffee in 2024 meant standing against high prices, labor rights violations, and corporations’ political machinations.

Ingredients contain another critical political dimension. Given food’s ability to gather, meal preparation and consumption are central to grassroots movements. One progressive student organization in the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society, devised a meal-time strategy in their “interracial movement of the poor.” From 1964 to 1966, that community organizing campaign established projects in fourteen Northern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern cities. Full-time staff and summer volunteers organized locals while living in the same derelict housing as their constituents. But they didn’t just live locally: they ate locally too, serving similar dishes to the families who lived in these neighborhoods full-time. Over 500 white middle-class young people circulated and followed what they called “recipes for semi-starvation.” By adhering to welfare recipients’ budgets, they cooked up community and solidarity.

Community organizing and the “recipes for semi-starvation” brought together Americans who lived in two different societies. Many Students for a Democratic Society members grew up in the suburbs with access to pocket money and went on to college classes after finishing high school. Antioch College freshman Christopher Overs felt confident that summer organizing in Cleveland, twenty-five miles from his suburban home, would not jeopardize his fall tuition. Similarly, Elaine Lipshutz, a sophomore at Radcliffe College, could dedicate her school breaks to the Boston project, headquartered a twenty-five-minute walk from campus, rather than waged labor. Relocating these relatively short distances, Overs, Lipshutz, and hundreds of others entered another social world.

A summer organizing in inner cities introduced undergraduates to the estimated forty million impoverished Americans, a demographic hidden from their childhood neighborhoods. Living in derelict housing in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Boston, and other cities, they talked with their new neighbors, white and Black families that postwar affluence had left behind. Many were un- or underemployed men and single mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program referred to as welfare. In discussions of daily struggles, the white students offered possible political solutions and invitations to tenant councils, unemployment unions, and welfare rights meetings.

Charlotte Brooks, “Image from LOOK – Job 65-2559 titled Divorced mother,” 18 Oct. 1965. Photograph shows divorced single mother Vi Erker eating dinner with her son Gary, Saint Louis, Missouri. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ds.08295

Voluntarily enduring poverty, progressives built community bonds and signaled their commitment to ending economic injustice partly through food. Both short-term volunteers like Harpur College student Judith Bernstein and full-time staff such as University of Michigan alumnus Carol McEldowney reckoned with the disparity between middle-class and low-income plates. Breakfast sometimes consisted of a single egg or an ounce of corn flakes topped with reconstituted milk. Between community meetings, they stuffed day-old bread with liverwurst and lettuce. After a long day of door-knocking, they often sat down to a dinner of liver and onions, creamed chicken over biscuits, or split pea soup with a salad dressed simply with a mayonnaise and ketchup mixture.[1] Their menus and their tireless efforts persuaded some locals that they were sincere and reliable social justice activists.

Eating what their neighbors could afford, the students came face-to-face with the political implications of welfare. Poor families could rely on the social safety net established by the New Deal and the War on Poverty. As countless learned firsthand, however, financial and material assistance programs afforded a bare minimum, placing countless commodities out of reach. The Cleveland project whittled their daily food allowance to forty-three cents per person, replicating the budget welfare programs provided.[2] Features of middle-class tables, like orange juice, were far too costly. “Don’t buy it unless the group shows signs of scurvy,” project leaders instructed.[3]

Through the Students for a Democratic Society’s organizational and culinary efforts, they established and revived grassroots antipoverty organizations that helped a national movement for economic justice to flourish. Their efforts most fruitful efforts were with single mothers who received welfare. They assisted the Citizens United for Adequate Welfare in Cleveland and Mothers for Adequate Welfare in Boston, organizations that channeled numerous welfare recipient activists into the National Welfare Rights Organization. While organizing at the grassroots, Students for a Democratic Society leaders used cuisine to establish interpersonal and political relationships between the sons and daughters of postwar affluence and less fortunate Americans.

[1] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 2, Students for a Democratic Society records, 1958-1970, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter SDS records).

[2] Hugh to O and C, July 29, 1964, box 24, folder 5, SDS records.

[3] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 1, SDS records.

 

Kimba Stahler is a Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. She is a historian of US women’s and gender history and social justice movements. She specializes in twentieth century antipoverty and feminist movements. Her research interests include participatory democracy, alliance formation among grassroots activists and organizations, and identity politics. 

For Kimba’s dissertation research, she conducted oral histories to uncover how members of the Students for a Democratic Society living in Cleveland constructed that organization’s most successful grassroots organizing campaign during the 1960s. Using those oral histories, she produced a story-telling podcast entitled “Visions of Democracy” that encourages listeners to think about the various forms that democratic participation takes. Her current book project, tentatively titled Rats in Common: The Untold History of Cleveland’s Interracial Welfare Rights Movement, explores how white middle-class political organizers and poor white and Black single mothers forged productive political relationships out of their shared commitment to radical forms of American democracy.